General Advice
Exploring AI-Driven Marketing Strategies to Grow Your SME’s Brand and Reach
Are you an SME but can’t figure out how to come up with better marketing strategies to reach your target audience and market yourself in an effective way? If so, you may want to consider leveraging AI in your marketing strategies to develop new innovative and effective options.
In today’s world AI has penetrated almost every industry. Businesses seek AI-led strategies to automate their marketing processes to save time, costs, and hassle.
Being an SME, you can no longer afford to ignore the potential benefits of utilising AI to grow your brand and reach online. It’s a no-brainer to use AI in marketing to target the right audience more efficiently and effectively.
So let’s dive in and explore some powerful and actionable AI-driven marketing strategies to grow your SME’s brand and reach, starting with some major benefits of using AI in marketing.
Benefits of AI in Marketing
AI algorithms have the capability to store and analyse large amounts of customer data for businesses. Thus, using AI in marketing allows the potential to provide better insights into customers’ preferences, behaviours, and interests. It is then possible to develop much more personalised marketing campaigns to target specific audiences using these insights.
Three key benefits of AI in marketing that SMEs can’t ignore include the following:
- Data analysis (AI helps businesses collect and analyse their customers’ data to craft more personalised marketing messages, product recommendations, and offers).
- Content creation (AI helps businesses create more personalised and engaging content for their target audience to increase their reach and grow their brand).
- Campaign management (AI helps businesses manage their marketing campaigns across multiple channels and optimise them by testing various personalised customer experiences).
See the “Personalisation” section to know the best tools for these.
AI-Driven Marketing Strategies for SMEs
AI is involved in almost every marketing tactic, and most marketing tools are now based on AI. Businesses use these AI tools to develop and implement different marketing strategies for better growth and outreach. That said, here are the three very popular AI-driven marketing strategies you can use to grow your SME’s brand and reach:
Chatbots
Chatbots help you lead your customers in the pipeline without recruiting extra chat managers or staying online 24/7. This is particularly so if your online business receives a large number of enquiries, from which most replies would be similar, that’s where AI-powered chatbots can help you automate the process and escape the hassle.
A chatbot is an automated conversation partner which handles customers’ responses without the limitations of time or quantity. For example, you can automate Instagram marketing with a chatbot by simply integrating it into your business’s Instagram page.
Besides facilitating your customers with automated and quick replies, it can also manage the orders coming in through the social media platform you’ve integrated it into. This gives you the best of both worlds, winning customers through timely replies to their burning queries and managing orders.
Many popular platforms let you set up a chatbot for your Instagram business. Here are a few popular ones among them:
- ManyChat
- BotHelp
- SendPulse
- MobileMonkey
- SMMBOT
Using any of these chatbots, you can set up a personalised chat flow for your customers by analysing demands and message history. On top of that, you can automate comments on your posts and instantly reply to someone who mentions you in their story using an AI chatbot.
Personalisation
If you want to connect with your customers on a deeper level, personalisation is a powerful marketing strategy to do this effectively and efficiently. Here’s how AI can help you with personalisation:
- It can collect and analyse your customers’ data to create professional and more personalised marketing messages, product recommendations, and offers.
- It can help you create personalised content that resonates with your target customers to grow your SME’s brand and reach effectively.
- It can help you deliver the same level of customised experience across all your online platforms, including your website, social media pages, and email newsletters.
A popular customer data platform is Twilio Segment. It helps businesses collect and unify customer data from various sources and provides AI-powered analytics and insights to create personalised marketing messages and product recommendations for their customers. Other popular tools include:
- Hootsuite Insights (an AI-based social media analytics tool to understand audiences and create more effective marketing strategies for them)
- Optimizely (an ML-based tool to test personalised customer experiences across various channels)
- Persado (an AI-fueled marketing platform that creates personalised marketing messages using natural language generation).
Predictive Analytics
As the name suggests, predictive analytics is an AI-fueled marketing strategy that helps you predict future outcomes using previous data and statistical algorithms. As an SME, you can identify which customers are most likely to make a purchase, which of your products or services are most likely to sell, and which marketing channels are the most effective for your business.
In short, you can make better and more efficient data-driven decisions using predictive analytics. Here are the three key strategies of predictive analytics for your SME’s brand and reach:
- You can collect and analyse customer data, such as purchase history, browsing behaviour, and demographic information, to gain insights into their interests, behaviours, and preferences using AI-driven analytics tools.
- Once you have the data of your customers, you can use it to launch targeted marketing campaigns for them, besides developing predictive models that can identify specific patterns and predict future outcomes, such as performance, sales, and brand growth.
- You can make more data-driven and timely decisions by mitigating risks to save budget and extra effort, ultimately increasing your SME’s growth and revenue.
Voice Search Optimisation
As the name suggests, with voice search optimisation, you can optimise your website or content for voice search queries using AI-driven natural language processing (NLP) tools. Millions of people use these voice search tools (such as Google Voice Search, Alexa, and Siri) on a daily basis, so there’s a big market to capture if your SME leverages voice search optimisation.
Here are some essential tips for integrating this marketing strategy into your SME website:
- Use natural language, as voice search queries are usually longer than regular ones.
- Provide clear and concise answers to the burning queries of your customers to get them into the featured snippets, which the voice assistant reads out loud.
- Optimise your content and answers for local search, as most voice search queries are location-based because customers usually search for nearby businesses or services.
- Improve your website speed as customers expect quick responses, suggesting that voice searches often have a sense of urgency.
- Use Schema markup, a structured data format that helps search engines understand your website’s content.
In short, make sure you provide more detailed information about products or services to get them featured in voice search results.
Conclusion
To wrap up, these four AI-driven marketing strategies can help your SME gain a competitive edge and achieve better marketing results with less effort and costs. Make sure you work with reputable providers to fully capitalise on the power of AI-backed marketing. Some reputable and proven providers of AI-driven marketing solutions you can use to grow your SME’s brand and reach include Salesforce, HubSpot, AWS, Adobe, and IBM. There are many more in the market too, but it all narrows down to your SMEs requirements, target, and budget. With these factors in mind and leveraging the right tools, your SME will grow at a faster pace than ever.
Opinion
How AI is Impacting Software Development Industry
In my tenure of nearly a decade in the software development field, I’ve seen small and medium business owners confront numerous challenging situations. The biggest challenge is competing with big companies while working with fewer people and less tech. This is where AI, or Artificial Intelligence, comes in.
In my own work, I’ve seen how AI can help small businesses do better. It can help us work faster, more easily, and save money. This article is about my experience with AI in software development. I’ll share how AI is changing the software field and how small businesses can use AI to improve their work.
Faster Work with AI
In my work as a developer, I’ve found AI tools can really speed things up. For instance, there was this one project where the deadline was tight. Using AI, we automated routine tasks like making code snippets and running tests. This freed up our time to focus on more important things. We finished faster than expected. I learned that small businesses can use AI to keep pace with big companies.
But, it’s not all smooth sailing. AI has its flaws. It’s like the time when I used an AI tool to generate code for a complex project. It ended up with errors and didn’t quite fit the project’s needs. So, I learned that while AI is helpful, we must always check the quality of the code it produces. Even though AI helps us work faster, we still need experienced developers to go over the AI-made code and make it better. I’ve found that this teamwork approach with AI makes sure the code is done right and keeps our standards high.
Making Reviews Easier with AI
AI is not just for coding. It also helps with reviewing work, but people don’t talk about this much. I remember using an AI tool called Reviewpad in one of my projects. It was pretty smart. It looked at past work to decide who should review new work, so the same person wasn’t always loaded with tasks. This made the review process faster. We could quickly finish reviewing, add the new code to the main project, and keep things moving.
By using tools like Reviewpad, small businesses can work better together. This is just another example of how AI is changing the way we work in software development.
Filling in Skill Gaps with AI
In traditional software work, developers handle most tasks like fixing bugs. But, some complex tasks need more experienced people, like Tech Leads or Software Architects. These include things like DevOps and serverless operations.
I remember working for a company that didn’t have many senior developers. They just started using Kubernetes and several other advanced DevOps tools. There was none who had experience with these technologies but a small team of developers started learning these technologies with the help of ChatGPT. It was surprising how much it helped. This team was able to handle the complete project with the help of any specific DevOps engineer.
With AI, small businesses can manage the challenge of skill gaps. They can rely less on senior developers. Overall, I notice that intermediate-level developers reap the greatest benefits from AI tools. Senior developers lose the advantage of having extensive experience, as AI tools can aid anyone in understanding complex technologies. On the other hand, entry-level developers might find it challenging to secure jobs, as AI tools can easily automate the tasks they are able to do. Ultimately, this situation will prove advantageous for intermediate-level developers, as most companies will be seeking their ability to do any job with the help of AI tools.
Finding Bugs and Smart Testing with AI
A big goal in making software is to give users a good product. But making sure the work is top quality can be tough. I’ve found that AI tools are a big help in this regard.
I was amazed at how fast AI tools could find problems in software and suggest how to fix them. There are AI tools that can find bugs in software applications that otherwise would need thousands of coded test cases. The fact that AI can find and fix problems early is a big plus for any small business.
Virtual Assistants and Intelligent IDEs
AI-powered virtual assistants and smart IDEs are becoming helpful tools for developers. They provide suggestions that fit the context, help with completing code, and generate code to boost developer productivity. By doing repetitive coding tasks and giving smart recommendations, AI tools allow developers to focus on more creative and challenging parts of software development.
Moreover, AI-powered virtual assistants can answer developers’ questions, supply references for documentation, and provide code snippets using natural language inputs. The assistance they provide in overcoming development hurdles, reducing development time, and improving productivity is significant.
From Analytics to Intelligent Insights
Data and AI are inseparable. AI can assist in decision-making by analyzing collected data. Thus, AI tools can also be used for decision-making in small and medium enterprises. This is another rarely discussed aspect of AI-based software tools.
One of the most tedious tasks in software development is data analysis. Now, this can be easily accomplished with the help of AI-driven analytics tools. These tools can process large volumes of data, identify patterns, and provide actionable insights based on them. These data-driven decisions can be massively leveraged to continuously improve software development processes.
Conclusion
In my view, AI is like a key that helps small businesses reach their goals more easily and effectively. From start to finish in making software – from figuring out what to build and writing it down, to coding and finding mistakes, to testing and making sure it’s top-notch – AI tools can help. They let small businesses keep up with bigger ones by making good software products fast.
But we have to be smart about using AI. Small businesses should pick the right AI tools, encourage teamwork between AI and human developers, and always make sure the quality of the work is top-notch. With AI, making quality software doesn’t have to be a hard task. It becomes something within reach.
AI Security
How AI Can Improve Customer Experience in SMEs
In today’s competitive business landscape, many small and medium businesses struggle to prioritize customer experience to leverage their products and services. With AI being one of the key assets for business growth in 2023, there are many ways to leverage AI to improve customer experience, sales, and productivity in your company. According to a report in Forbes, 64% of business owners think that AI can improve customer relationships. In this guide, we’ll talk about how AI can assist in the development and improvement of customer experience in SMEs and how your business can utilise it.
How AI Can Improve Customer Experience: 5 Ways
How we use customer and sales data depends on AI. The AI can help us collect customer data, as well as analyze it for better marketing and business strategies. Here are 5 ways that can help you improve customer experience with the help of machine learning and AI.
Data-driven Virtual Assistants
Implementing AI-powered VAs can be extremely valuable for the overall service your business provides. It can cut costs and reduce wait times so your customers and clients have faster access to solutions to their problems.
AI VAs can be available on multiple platforms and guide your customers to the solution to their issues. In case the issue is too complex, it can be referred to the human customer service agent.
Having a virtual assistant powered by AI can be a great asset for a business that operates globally and can help address overworked customer support agents that are often overwhelmed by the volume of work.
Chatbots
Another way how AI can improve customer experience in SMEs is by implementing chatbots on your website. It is another way to make it easier on customer service personnel, especially if your business is small and struggles to provide round-the-clock support due to limited resources.
Chatbots are already not uncommon, especially with service providers and online stores. But, with advanced AI systems based on LLMS (Large Language Models), they’re now even more improved, and able to converse almost naturally.
AI-powered chatbots can help you collect emails, appointment dates, order numbers, and other repetitive data, while your human customer service can focus on more time-sensitive and complex tasks.
Use Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is a powerful tool you can use when creating a marketing strategy for your business. It enables marketing managers to develop strategies that resonate with their potential customers and clients.
Understanding customer feedback is one of the best ways how AI can improve customer experience in SMEs. By identifying behavioral patterns and trends in customer sentiment, SMEs can proactively address issues and improve customer satisfaction.
Predictive Analytics for Demand Forecasting
AI can help SME owners analyse customer behavior and demand based on their previous purchases, shopping cart contents, wish list, and browsing patterns. Analysing this behaviour can also help managers choose the right time to start sales and introduce new products and services.
Predictive analytics is also helpful in providing businesses with valuable insights, allowing them to optimise inventory management and influence demand patterns. By leveraging AI’s predictive abilities, SMEs can reduce costs, improve resource allocation and enhance customer satisfaction.
Enhanced Cybersecurity Measures
If you’re wondering how AI can improve customer experience in SMEs by improving the cybersecurity of your website and other assets, it’s simply because customers will appreciate knowing that their data is safe and confidential.
Maintaining robust cybersecurity is crucial for protecting customer data and ensuring their trust in SMEs. AI can enhance cybersecurity measures by monitoring network traffic and identifying and mitigating potential threats. AI is also successful at detecting anomalies that can hint at security and data breaches.
By leveraging AI-powered security systems, SMEs can enhance their ability to protect customer data, ensuring top-notch customer experience.
Conclusion
AI enables SMEs to deliver tailored and seamless experiences to their customers and clients. By implementing chatbots and AI-powered virtual assistants, as well as a streamlined e-commerce experience, positive customer feedback and satisfaction are guaranteed. Identifying how AI can improve customer experience in SMEs is crucial for leveling the playing field and competing with larger enterprises while creating long-lasting customer relationships and trust.
General Advice
AI in SMEs: How to Prepare for the Future of Work?
Artificial intelligence is transforming the way different businesses operate, and that’s just the beginning of AI revolution. Many business owners are brainstorming whether there’s a place for AI in SMEs, and how it will shape the future of work and employment in those businesses.
Many people are concerned that with rapid AI development, roles and professions that are today crucial to businesses will become obsolete. That’s not without a reason because of the way AI is being promoted in media and the fact it can simplify so many daily tasks that’d normally take hours.
New AI tools emerge every day, from OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Bard to thousands of other AI-powered tools that can generate images, videos, summarize meetings, YouTube videos, and even write a research study.
According to research published by Jobbio, many people who are employed full-time are scared of the potential threat of AI for their jobs. According to data obtained for the research, around one-fifth of workers in The USA think that their jobs will no longer exist within the next ten years.
Instead of looking at it as a threat, small to medium enterprises should look for ways to implement AI in a way that can help them organize their workflow and improve productivity. Continue reading to learn how to use AI in SMEs to prepare for the future of work.
5 Ways to Use AI in SMEs to Prepare for the Future
As of 2022, there are 5.5 million SMEs in the UK, which makes up about 99.9% of the private sector, according to government data. Here’s how to leverage AI in SMEs and make better results.
Invest in AI Training
To use AI effectively the members of your organization will need to learn how to use it properly. You can do this through workshops, crash courses, bootcamps, and other forms of education. All SMEs should prioritize education and training within their workforce.
Developing AI literacy among your employees is the crucial step towards the effective use of AI in SMEs because it can help them identify where AI adds the most value to their work. This initiative can help foster innovation, identify AI use cases and cultivate a culture of continuous learning.
Maximize Workflow Automation
Many tools in the past allowed employees to automate their workflow, making it more effective. However, the integration of different AI tools available on the market can help maximize it. That said, AI in SMEs is quite important for automation.
According to research by Accenture, people will be able to focus on “exceptional work” which includes the non-routine tasks that generate more than 80% of value. In other words, the use of AI surpasses the traditional automation tools used in the past.
With the ability to automate even more tasks, even the non-routine ones, employees will be able to increase efficiency and focus on more strategic and creative endeavors.
Prioritize Data-driven Decision Making
AI is powered by data, and as such, it can help SMEs use it to make informed, data-driven decisions. But, to use business data as fuel for AI, businesses need to recognize the value in data and establish robust data management practices and policies.
SMEs can use data to get insights into customer behaviors and predict market trends as well as operational flaws and inefficiencies that maximize the loss and hold the company back from reaching its objectives. Using AI to identify potential security and privacy flaws can help establish firm security and privacy measures and adhere to data regulation.
That way, AI in SMEs can help build customer and stakeholder trust.
Invest in an Open AI Culture
SMEs shouldn’t see AI as a threat to job security but rather foster an open AI culture among teams and other employees.
It’s important to foster a culture where both humans and machines collaborate, making the job smoother, more effective, and more efficient. AI is designed to augment human performance and allow employees to work smarter while identifying weaknesses they can address to turn into strengths.
SMEs should encourage employees to explore the capabilities of AI and different AI-fueled solutions that can complement their work performance. AI in SMEs can lead to innovative and creative solutions as well as increased productivity which can be used for projects in the future.
Automate the HR
Have you ever heard of the term HAIR? It refers to automated human resources, leading to faster processing of large volumes of candidate data in efforts to find candidates that are more suitable for different positions.
It’s important to educate HR managers and the rest of the HR department on how to set an automated environment in a way that will allow them to analyze performance and other metrics regarding employment. HR managers will also need to analyze and explore ways to tell the AI performance apart from human work.
Conclusion
The AI revolution has started, and we’re yet to see the peak of AI in SMEs. One thing is for sure, SMEs will need to optimize AI in order to stay competitive in the market. The age of AI will bring even more SMEs forward that will know how to harness the power of AI to get on top of the industry.
By investing in AI education, training, and adaptability, and embracing automation SMEs will be more than prepared for the AI-driven future.
